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Arcades were the original malls. That’s a heavy and probably unfair burden to bear. But they were created by retailers and developers to control the environment. You are free to do what you want as long as you are buying and not ruining the buying experience for anybody else.

But the arcade was the nursery of the aimless wanderer, the flaneur, the turtle-walker, the place where you were among, or rather you were, the crowd. The grip of commerce wouldn’t always hold. Your only obligation was to understand and comment on the passing scene.

Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes. — Walter Benjamin

Now we have virtual arcades: Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. We can occupy other bodies. We can think and say and retract and sing our bodies electric. Like in the arcade, on the internet, we believe we are free. Our job, of course, as the ads on my WordPress pages reminds me, is to buy.